Hello to anyone that reads this!

It's been awhile. Too long of awhile, really. I just read through my last update and realized how much has happened since then. My mission trip, graduation, Labor Day weekend with Rachel, Mom & Dad, ESOAL, the first 2 1/2 months of my GI year. My life is pretty different from last year, and yet it many ways it's still the same. I had planned on this being a nice, long, interesting update, but I don't think it will be. Look for one of those in the future. For now, know that I love and miss you all so, so much. In spite of my lack of communication, I do really want to know what's going on in your lives, and want you to know what is going on in mine. Feel free to comment, message me, email, or even call. You can get my contact info from my parents, or my facebook.

Anyway, this weekend, we're having a fasting retreat on campus. So if you do try to contact me, and I don't respond for the next 3 days, that's why. Please pray that I would press into the heart of God this weekend, and that through it I would gain insight and vision for the things He wants me to pursue for my GI year. Pray that all distractions would fall to the side, and that I would be able to fix my gaze on Jesus and tune my ears to hear him speaking to me.

May you be blessed with the abundant life that Jesus came to give us.
With love,
Bethany

-----Hi everyone! I must apologize for my failure to update as often as I had intended to. This year has flown by so quickly, and yet arriving in august last year seems so far away. On this past Wednesday, we hit the 1-month-till-graduation mark. It's hard to believe that my first year here is coming to a close. Yes, I said first year, as in there is going to be a second. I'm not sure all of you know this already or not, but I am planning on staying another year here at the Honor Academy. It was a big decision to make, but I believe it's what God has for me for this next period of my life.
-----Next year will be a lot different from this past one, I'm sure, with many changes and challenges. After graduation in August many of my friends here will be heading home or off to college or wherever else the Lord may direct them, and a whole new class of August Interns will arrive. I'll be what's called a "Graduate Intern(GI)," which basically means an Intern who has successfully completed and graduated from her undergrad year. Specifically I'll be joining the Management Associate program(MA, (Yes, I know, we have a lot of acronyms). You see, the Honor Academy has a couple of different tracks that you can go down as a GI. There's School of Worship, Core Advisor, Ministry Team, and Management Associate.
-----As an MA, I'll be able to get food allotment and buy and cook my own meals and move out of the dorms into GI housing, which I'm really looking forward to. I'll still have a Ministry Placement, but it will change a bit from what I do now as Registration Representative in Acquire the Fire Operations. Next year I'll be Registration and Customer Care Supervisor, and I'll be over the various ticketing, seating, and customer care issues for the entire ATF Tour next year. I'm really excited about this next year, and the many ways I'll be stretched and challenged. I'm also somewhat nervous, since I've never had a leadership position before, but I know God will help me, and if I mess up at something, I'll just get back up again. That's one thing I've learned a lot about this year, to not be afraid of failures and mistakes. Although they're not fun when you're going through them, they really help you learn a lot. A quote from C.S. Lewis sums it up: "If only we have the will to walk, then God is pleased with our stumbles." God has been teaching me so much about being resting secure in His love and strength, and walking confidently forward in that. I still have a lot of growing to do in that, but I'm okay with that.
----- Anyway, one of the main reasons I wanted to update is to tell you about the mission trip I will be starting in . . . oh, 40 minutes. As most of you know, I had been hoping to go to Scotland with Global Expeditions(GE), but unfortunately I wasn't able to raise the support for that trip. However, I am going on their Dallas trip, from July 10-24th. We'll be running a VBS, doing some outreach in the local community, and also helping a local church with a service project. Besides that, I'm not sure what we'll be doing, but I'm excited for it. I'm not really sure what to expect from this trip, but am looking forward to seeing what God does over these next 2 weeks. Please pray that we would have doors opened before us, and that we would be used to bring the Kingdom of God to Dallas. Also, I may have the opportunity to be a Missionary Advisor during the trip, which means I'll have a small group of girls that I'll be mentoring/leading during the trip. Please pray that I would be open to the leading of the Holy Spirit, and that God would give me wisdom and discernment in that role.
-----Well, got to run. Thank you so much for your interest and support of me here . . . I couldn't do it without you! May the grace of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, be with you, now and always.
In Him, with love,
Bethany

Back on Campus

Hey everyone! Sorry I haven't updated as often as I would've liked. I plan to more in the future. Anyway, things have been very busy down here in Texas, but also very good. Plus, I was able to go to the Baltimore Acquire the Fire this past weekend, and spend 3 days with my family afterwards!! It was such a blessing to be able to spend Mother's day with my family, and also see a lot of you at our party/picnic afterwards. I felt so blessed by God with the friends and family he has given me. It was wonderful. :)
I'll update more in the next few days, but for now I have to go.
Love you all!
-Bethany

Update, Part I.

Hello my friends!

**Before you read this, could you take a few minutes and scroll to the bottom of this page and check out my fundraising update? Then you can come back to this and catch up a bit on my life, and leave me some comments. :) Thanks!**

This will be a relatively short post, but I wanted to take a few minutes and let you know what's been going on in my life down here in Texas.
~~This is the first weekend in the past month that I didn't have anything major going on. First we had the UPG LTE, which you can read about in my previous post. Then we had the Endurance LTE, which means we ran the Tyler Azalea 10k with the local community. Next I went to the Indianapolis BattleCry event. Finally, we had Easter break, which I spent with my room mates family in Austin.
~~As you can probably tell, springtime at the Honor Academy is crazy busy, and its getting busy-er as we approach the summer. Much of the busyness is caused by the two ministries that are a large part of Teen Mania: mainly, Acquire the Fire and Global Expeditions. Acquire the Fire youth events are 2 day concerts/conferences designed to reach middle school and high school students with the message of Christ and to transform their lives because of His love. I have to admit that when I first came to the HA I was a bit skeptical as to whether or not the ATFs really accomplished this goal. But so far I've been able to go to 2 events, and I've seen that people really do encounter God there. I love the focus this year, because it's all about Jesus. It was so cool to go the Indianapolis event and watch kids begin to grasp His love for them, and what He did for them because of it. At the end, they're given the opportunity to surrender their lives, or different sins they've been struggling with, to Him, and literally nail them to a cross. For a good 20 minutes the hammering fills the venue as 12 year olds, 15 year olds, high school seniors, parents and even youth leaders come forward and nail pieces of paper to the wood. It's a somber, tearful, yet joyful time. The worship afterwords in amazing. Being at Indy gave the 31 hours I spend each week working to make them possible new meaning, and I realized once again that it's totally worth it.
~~This weekend was our biggest event, the New York BattleCry! 13,000 people were there, and I'm looking forward to hearing how it went . . . I pray lives were changed! The ATF season is drawing to a close soon, with the last events only 3 weeks away. But campus life isn't slowing down, instead it's picking up as things transition into preparing for the thousands of youth who will be sent from here on summer missions trips with Global Expetions. God-willing, I'll be going on one too, so please keep me in your prayers for that.
~~So I just realized this update hasn't filled you in on much of my life, but that's partly because a lot of my life here involves the different ministries of Teen Mania. Other parts include my classes, my Core, and my relationship with God. Tomorrow I'll do my best to fill you in on those areas, but for now I must bid you adieu . . . Corporate exercise begins in 5 hours, followed by another challenging, growing, stretching, learning, exhilarating, enriching, fun, God-centered day at the Honor Academy. Until next time, I am . . .
Resting in Him,
Bethany

UPG - Update

Hey friends,
Sorry I haven't gotten a chance to update this in a while. Hopefully I'll get a chance to write a real update tomorrow, but I have to write a paper tonight. For now, I thought I'd share with you a paper I wrote on my Unreached People Groups experience. We have these things called "Reflection Papers" which are assigned after different LTEs and teachings we have. They're not graded, but they're required, and they just want us to take time to think about what we're learning, and write it down. So here's mine . . . if you have any questions about things, just let me know. Love you all!

Actions Speak Louder than Words
---->Although it was only a day and a half long, the Unreached People Groups LTE was one of my favorite LTE’s. It taught me so much about the importance of loving unconditionally and persevering in sharing your faith. My group represented the Kotokoli tribe of West Africa, a Muslim people group known for trading and stealing. Honestly, we didn’t study them nearly as much as we should have, nor did we do a very good job of coming up with our language, learning our culture and developing the roles we would each play. But even though I went into it unprepared and uncertain about how it would turn out, I still came out loving the experience.
One of the main things I learned was how necessary it is to share your faith gently, without devaluing other people's beliefs. I know it’s very hard to do, since sharing the Gospel involves telling people that there is only one way to God, though his son, and this means worshipping other gods is sin. But as Christians we must speak the truth in love, or people won’t listen to us. As Muslims, my tribe was very devoted to Allah and worshipping him. Our beliefs were a large part of our identity and culture, and when our missionaries wouldn’t worship with us and told us our god wasn’t real, it greatly offended us. When they rejected our beliefs, it was like they were rejecting us, and this definitely built a wall between us that they had to work hard at pulling down later on.
---->Along with this I learned that it’s important to get to know people before trying to tell them about your beliefs, and before trying to change theirs. Our missionaries told us about God fairly early in the UPG, before they really knew us or had developed any kind of a relationship with us. Admittedly, we were deliberately making it hard for them to get to know us, by acting distant and not talking a lot. But I think that was realistic, because I’m sure a lot of tribes wouldn’t just open right up to a bunch of foreigners showing up out of nowhere. It would have been a lot better if they had worked at getting to know us before trying to tell us about Jesus. I think that developing that relationship is part of sharing your faith gently, so that you have somewhere to start from when you do begin to speak the truth of Christ, as opposed to the lies they have believed. It’s a lot easier to accept, and less offensive, when there is trust and love behind the message.
---->Because our missionaries did offend us and disrespect our beliefs, and also our culture by singing, which was one of our taboos, we treated them pretty harshly. We made them get in the nearby freezing cold pond when they wouldn’t worship Allah with us, and we made them start their own fire after one of them accidentally hit our chief’s daughter with a piece of firewood. This all took place on Friday night, and although we had a brief peaceful interlude Saturday morning, the tension grew worse Saturday afternoon after the tribal meeting. There the government(our leadership here, who were running the LTE) told us that the missionaries were responsible for the death of other tribes’ people, we believed them. Our chief teamed up with the chief of our neighboring tribe and decided to punish our missionaries together. We made them get back in the pond for a long time, and then made the girls watch while the guys rolled in the sand and we taunted them.
---->It was some fairly intense persecution, for a role-playing LTE. Looking back, I think it would’ve been better if we had been a bit nicer, although I really didn’t have much say in the matter, because in my role I was the tribe’s outcast. But although I wish we would have toned it down, I know we all learned a lot from that time. For us tribal members, it was their perseverance, their words of love and kindness to us, and their faithfulness to God in the midst of it, that really began to tear down the walls we’d set up. After that all happened, we made them leave our camp, and we weren’t sure if they’d come back. But we knew that if they did, we’d be willing to listen. Thankfully, they did come back, and all but 3 members of our tribe ended up getting saved.
---->Although after Friday night I wouldn’t have expected it to happen, surprisingly, most of what I learned during the LTE was because of our missionaries. Yes, they made quite a few mistakes, and we did too. We all could have been a lot more prepared. But through their example I learned what not to do, like disrespect people’s culture and beliefs, and try to change people without knowing them. More importantly though, I learned some valuable things to do, like love people unconditionally, and persevere in spite of hardships. The thing that struck me the most is that actions really do speak louder than words, especially if you’re from different cultures and speak different languages. They probably didn’t realize it, but we were watching them all the time. No matter what the missionaries said, we weren’t willing to listen to them until their actions starting lining up with their words. When that happened, it made all the difference, and lives were changed.

~The end!

OH, and here's a picture . . . this is what I looked like for most of the LTE, except my hair was pulled back by a scarf, and I probably smiled every now and then.

Unreached People Groups LTE

Here at the Honor Academy we occasionally have these things called LTE's. That stands for Life Transforming Event, and typically it is a weekend set aside for a specific focus and activity. So far this year we've had the Mountain LTE, 2 Vision and Fasting LTEs, The Week of the Ring LTE, and ESOAL. Each of these deserve a post of their own, and hopefully I'll write one for them in the future, but right now I want to talk about this weekend's LTE.

Tomorrow we start the Unreached People Groups LTE. For this LTE, we were split up into small groups and designated either Tribes or Missionaries. Each Tribe is given a present day UPG to study and learn about, and then to role-play as them Friday night into Saturday. The Missionaries are also assigned an unreached tribe, and they must devise a plan to reach them, and then act it out during the LTE. So tomorrow at 3:00 we'll be going out to the back 400 acres behind our campus and roleplaying as tribes and missionaries. I am a tribes person, and I'm super excited to see what it's like to need missionaries to come tell me about Jesus. I think it'll help me get a new perspective on Missions, and I'm sure our "missionaries" will get a new perspective to.

So that's where I'll be this weekend. If you think of me, please pray that I would hear what God wants to teach me through this. Thank you!

Much love,
~Bethany

It's about time

My undergrad year at the Honor Academy is more than half way finished. I only have a little under five months left. In light of this, I think it's about time that I let you all know what I'm doing down here. So here I am, beginning this blog.
Through this blog, I hope to keep my family, friends, and supporters relatively up-to-date on the events, happenings, occurrences, and what-not that goes on in my life, and to let them my know my thoughts on said matters. I also hope it will be a simple and convenient way for me to connect with you, and for you to connect with me. I won't make any promises on how often I'll update, because I'm not confident I could keep them. But as things happen in my life, I'll do my best to post my chronicles of them on here.
Until next time, I remain . . .

Content in Him,
Bethany